This is an uncomfortable book to rate. On subject matter alone, it's a 5/5. An unflinching, necessary account of the human wreckage behind the world's cobalt supply chain. On literary craft, it lands closer to a 3/5. The question worth sitting with is whether that's actually a fair way to judge it.

The reporting itself is the book's strength. Kara's interviews with miners , especially including children working in collapsing tunnels for a few dollars a day is heart wrenching. But the structure around that testimony grows repetitive: arrive at a mine, witness horror, register outrage, move to the next site.

But maybe that's the wrong yardstick. The book is an act of testimony and advocacy, written to move a topic into public conversation, not entertain.

How can I rate it justifiably with my cell phone that has the battery with cobalt from the same mining places, my laptop, kindle, everything around us, has the blood of the people slaving away in the mines.

So maybe 3/5 as "literature" is fair, but slightly beside the point. Cobalt Red isn't asking to be admired. It's asking to be believed, to be the voice for the voiceless dying in the mines of congo for the amount of money that we don't hesitate to spend on a dinner and night out in our cities.

I went into The Man in the High Castle with sky-high expectations, but unfortunately it fell short well off the mark. The writing is sharp, the overarching themes of Cultural Imperialism & Assimilation, Moral Ambiguity under Totalitarianism are done well, and the atmosphere of life under occupation is brilliantly unsettling.

My main issue is how the book actually ends, or rather, doesn't.

Instead of feeling like a complete story, reading this felt like I'd accidentally picked up Part 1 of an 800-page epic that got sliced in pieces and the rest of the pieces are lost. I kept waiting for all these character threads to at least weave together, but the open-ended conclusion just leaves half the cast hanging in mid-air.

The lack of resolution left me underwhelmed. It’s a technically fantastic setup that just didn't deliver the payoff I was hoping for.

Funny, ahead of its time, and surprisingly modern. Edith Grossman’s translation makes Don Quixote especially enjoyable, preserving its wit and absurdity without making it feel dated. I found the first part hilarious, though the knight-errant formula eventually became somewhat repetitive, with Don Quixote and Sancho repeatedly stumbling into variations of the same misadventures.

The second part, I felt , was much stronger. Its more focused story provided a much-needed relief from the repetitive structure of the first, while also giving the characters and their relationship more depth. Even after 400 years, Don Quixote still feels remarkably inventive, and genuinely funny.

Definitely not what I thought the book would be, and glad that it was so different from what I relate classics to.